Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.–The National Institute of Mental Health congratulated the Republican Party for helping to accustom Americans to those with mental illness, by elevating obvious psychopaths to positions of high office.

Doctor Fernando Lamas, chairman of the Institute, said at a press conference that Republican voters have done the United States “a great service, showing more so-called progressive Americans that those with antisocial disorders–who are typically demonized in popular horror films–can be entrusted with political power as long as we shirk our civic duties and learn to keep lowering our standards for acceptable public behaviour.”

According to Dr. Lamas, the Republican Party began this initiative in the 1980s when Republicans found that they could concoct excuses for Ronald Reagan’s declining health, which he suffered due to an onset of Alzheimer’s. Prior to that, Republicans were embarrassed when President Nixon’s megalomania was unveiled by the Watergate scandal.

“But their reverence for the mentally ill really ramped up,” said Dr. Lamas, “when Republicans managed to keep a straight face as they elected George W. Bush as president. Perhaps inadvertently at first, but surely with a charitable intention thereafter, Republicans worked tirelessly to teach mentally healthy citizens not to ignore the deranged, as George Bush Jr.’s cornucopia of follies left the whole world dumbfounded.”

By excusing Bush’s daily embarrassments and epic fiascos, Republicans brought mental disorder out of the shadows. Dr. Lamas compared this Republican initiative to gay rights advocacy: “both Republicans and homosexuals flaunt their peculiarities, whether on the national political stage or in Gay Pride parades, forcing everyone else to become inured to that which they might once have loathed.

“After Bush there was Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice presidential nominee. With her bizarre turns of phrase, her unabashed ignorance on all relevant matters, her clueless mix of Christianity, family values, and sociopathic Republican boilerplate, she took hysterical mean-spiritedness to a higher level.

“But it’s that party’s fearlessness in spotlighting such palpably-malignant personalities,” continued Dr. Lamas, “as though they could be entrusted with vast political power, that’s done wonders in removing the stigma from mental illness.” Republicans have been particularly generous with sociopaths, not just by thrusting them into mainstream discourse, but by “coaching them to be evermore lax in disguising their inhuman lack of empathy.”

“Sociopathy, an extreme form of Antisocial Personality Disorder, is a mainstay of the political world,” said Gwendolyn Bianca, political scientist at Fancypants University, who also spoke at the press conference. Bianca argued that since it’s axiomatic that power eventually corrupts even the most moral of individuals, we can expect that a disproportionate number of politicians (as well as businesspeople and other wealthy or powerful persons) lack the capacity to feel complex emotions.

“Conscience is a luxury they can’t afford,” said Bianca, “because a politician’s duty demands that he or she sacrifice others for the greater good, a burden that would be intolerable to anyone with some moral sense.”

Dr. Lamas said that because Donald Trump, the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, has “given the game away, displaying no trace of shame or compassion, all Americans owe the Republican Party a debt of gratitude for its service to the mentally ill.”

Bianca added that “whereas Democratic leaders have opted for the traditional approach of hiding their elitist contempt for humanity behind feel-good messages and empty socialist promises, psychopathic Republicans have refused to sit at the back of the bus. Unlike Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton, whose antisocial personalities were formed when they were indoctrinated into the neoliberal technocracy and who thus mistake loss of conscience for exceptional rationality, Republican lunatics have shown no deference to the public’s prejudice against human predators.

“Republican elites wear their insanity on their sleeve, whereas Democratic politicians pretend to care about the little people. And bless the American voters for their bottomless tolerance for the absurd! Thanks to that recklessness, mental health issues have come to the fore, which has flooded mental health clinics across the nation with much-needed donations.”

Ben Cain is a misanthropic omega male who likes to think that the more you suffer, the funnier you can be, and the more of an alienated loser you are, the more you can withstand coming face to face with the horrors of reality. He dedicated himself to discovering whether suffering has a meaning and so he earned a meaningless Ph.D. in analytic philosophy. He shares his findings by writing philosophical rants on his blog, Rants within the Undead God, and he's published a novel, called God Decays, which is available on Amazon. Also, he's pretentiously written this bio in the third person even though he rarely partakes of such conventional trickery.

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